Out of Zion

Dr. Susan Michael: Welcome to the Israel Answers series, connecting Israel, the Bible, and you. Join Susan Michael as she explores timeless issues and current events from a scriptural perspective to equip the Christian world with a balanced and biblical response. Be sure to subscribe for future episodes, which will ignite your faith and bring the Bible to life in your everyday world. Now, let’s join Susan with your Israel Answers.

Shellene: Welcome to the Out of Zion podcast. I’m Shellene, filling in for Dr. Susan Michael. Today we have a really special guest with us, an author of a newly released book called *Pharaoh: Curse of the Kings*. Adam Chandler, welcome to the show.

Adam Chandler: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Shellene: I think you might be our first guest this season to talk about ancient Egypt, so that’s very exciting for me. Can you just tell us what got you interested in writing about Egypt and its role in the biblical narrative as a whole?

Adam Chandler: I met a bunch of people about 20 years ago that were working in Saudi Arabia looking for the mountain there. Jim and Penny Caldwell, Leonard Moller, who spent time with Ron Wyatt, and Bob Cornuke. All of these people started talking to me about this idea.

I got immersed in that idea and as I began to study that, I began to see so much of the Egyptian connections to all of that and the whole Exodus story. Then I just got lost in, like many people do, loving Egyptology and the ancient stuff and all the sites.

I began to study all of that and I began to look for evidence of the biblical narrative and the stories in Egypt because I believe the Bible’s true. I believe it’s not just a theological book, but it’s actually historical. It’s the most accurate, verifiable archaeological book ever written.

The big question was: Is there any evidence of the Jewish presence in Egypt? Why did God keep taking people back to Egypt when there was oppression? All of these questions to me about geopolitics, archaeology, and biblical theology began to grow up in a study of Egyptology.

Shellene: Egypt does play a strange role because, like you said, it’s the boogeyman of the Bible in lots of ways. It’s the place of the oppression, the place that the Israelites were enslaved and freed from, but it also is a place of escape. It’s a place that is immune from famine, where the patriarchs go and later our Savior goes. How does that overplay in the narrative of your book? Is Egypt the bad guy or is Egypt the great escape?

Adam Chandler: I tried not to make the good and bad guys so two-dimensional because there’s elements of all of that. Egypt in the book lives in the background of an ancient story where the modern-day character is discovering. He’s an archaeologist that has been searching for historical clues for the preservation of Western civilization.

He thinks that inside of Egypt there’s an answer, but he’s completely oblivious to the role that Israel has played in that story. His discovery along the journey of this story discovers that the Exodus is the Rosetta Stone of the Bible and the Middle East.

When you understand the Exodus, you understand a lot of geopolitics and ancient history, and he comes to fully understand Egyptology when he discovers the biblical story. Egypt and Mizraim are not the bad guy; they are the background for what’s going on. I’m writing a trilogy, so the second book will have a lot more in modern-day Egypt and some of the things that are growing up there now.

Shellene: There’s two camps in biblical historians and archaeologists that exist within Bible-believing people: a late Exodus or an early Exodus. Which side do you take and why?

Adam Chandler: I’m the early Exodus. The biblical answer is I use the chronology of the internal dating in the Bible according to Kings and Chronicles, set to the time of the 586 destruction of the temple. When you set that destruction time, which is pretty well developed in history at 586 BC, you get the 1446 date.

I don’t take the later dating because it’s not consistent with the biblical internal structure, which I think is pretty accurate. But also, the whole idea of the story is that when you use the text to interpret the text, you find the timeline. Then you can begin to understand who, what, where, why, and the whole arc of the story begins to make sense instead of starting with a date that wasn’t from the Bible.

Shellene: The Bible doesn’t give all the details because it is trying to tell the story of freedom, revolution, and miracles, so it doesn’t name the Pharaoh, which would have been very helpful if it did. It’s a place of dishonor to not name the Pharaoh in that way, although it would have made it easier for our lives now. For Bible nerds like myself, that is a huge question: Who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus? Your book is named *Pharaoh*, so you also keep consistent with that biblical theme and not naming him in your title, but is the Pharaoh identified in your book?

Adam Chandler: Yes, that’s the big punchline. It’s the story that comes to fruition in a synagogue underneath Temple Mount in Jerusalem as they read the scroll of Shemot, the Exodus Torah scroll. They come to understand based on the whole journey that they didn’t know they were on to discover who the Pharaoh of the Exodus was.

More than discovering the name of the person, the story is nested inside of the dynamics that in every generation for thousands of years, strong men have controlled nations and they sacrifice the next generation to hold onto power. It’s a story of a son coming out from underneath his father’s weight to forge a new path with a new story, and it’s overlaid on all of that.

The big punchline is not who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus; that’s embedded in the story. I had so much archaeology in the Thutmosid dynasty and Hatshepsut and all of the collapse of the 18th dynasty. I couldn't cram more steles in. I took a lot out and I focused on the Dream Stele in between the paws of the Sphinx, which features prominently in the story as part of a propaganda piece for Thutmose IV, why he wrote it, and how he’s connected to Hatshepsut and the Exodus story and the death of the firstborn.

Shellene: We are at ICEJ, which is Israel-related ministry, and your book does bring Israel into the story. Is it modern Israel or just ancient Israel? How does Israel feature?

Adam Chandler: I wanted to not really sneak it in, but I didn't want to make it about Israel. My heart in writing the story was to show anyone that would read it that Israel has a historic homeland. They have a right to exist in that homeland and that the modern state of Israel is living in a very complicated part of the world.

The last third of the novel takes place in Jerusalem. It begins with an airlift into Ramat Gan for critical care and a wound that gets sustained. Then there’s a terrorist attack in the market in Tel Aviv. The final part is that a rabbi takes the team on a tour throughout Jerusalem, and they walk through the springs of Gihon and Hezekiah’s Tunnel, basically taking the route themselves and discovering Israel.

The modern state is tied to the ancient story of the Exodus and Egypt. My hope is at the end of the book you realize that maybe the Exodus did happen, maybe Israel does have a right to exist as a nation, and maybe my black-and-white gloss that international media has given me about Israel being the boogeyman needs a little more color.

Shellene: A lot of times we can hammer home over and over these points that you make: that the Bible is true, that miracles happened, that God performed great things in the presence of many witnesses. You are specifically trying to do this through story. Can you just explain your strategy for that and how you believe you can reach people not just through facts but through story?

Adam Chandler: I believe that meaning lives inside of story, and that’s actually true neurologically in our brains. There’s four big kinds of meaning. Number one is propositional. This is the realm where things live in different places in the neurosynaptic centers in the mind and the brain. The first kind of meaning is propositional; these are facts, things that you can know and have, like "I’m a conservative" or "I’m a Christian" or "I’m a Muslim" or "I believe that this is true."

The second kind of knowing is process. If you know how to swim, ride a bike, or code a website, it’s true or false that you can do that, but the knowledge isn’t true or false; that lives inside of a different place. But the third part is called perspectival, and this is a place that lives in the semantic memory. These are the stories that play when you remember, and when you know something attached to a story that plays in your mind: the day you got married, the birth of your child, a Christmas event.

That is a kind of knowing that lives beneath the propositional. Our Christian culture hasn’t done a great job embedding meaning in the perspectival. Jesus did nothing that he didn't do in the perspectival. He told stories and parables; his public ministry was parables. Matthew says he told them nothing that he didn't say in parables.

When you can tell the story, capture a heart, capture a mind, and tell a story, at the end you’ll see and not just know. That gets into Shema and why going to Israel is such a big deal. God knew this. He wrote the Bible perspectivally, too. You’re not trying to tell the story of the whole world; you’re trying to tell the story of God’s engagement with a people and how he reveals himself to humanity.

Shellene: Tell our listeners where they can find your book.

Adam Chandler: You can find it on Amazon; you can search for *Pharaoh: Curse of the Kings*. You can go to my website, exodusfiles.com. That’s a Bible study that I built all around the topics in this fictional book, and so you can buy it there. I have signed author's copies. I’d love for you to buy it, engage with the story, and write a great review if you like it. If you don’t like it, you can still write a review. All press is good press.

Shellene: Thank you so much, Adam. It was so wonderful to have you. ICEJ, we take tours to Israel. We encourage everyone to go to Israel and walk these sites. But if that isn't possible for you, reading these kinds of stories and placing yourself in the land through books and through your imagination is also wonderful as well, so that’s something I encourage everyone to do. Thank you for being with us on *Out of Zion*.

Give me one more minute; I want to offer you one of our free resources. We have wonderful resources in our show notes and if you go to our website at icejusa.org/shownotes, you’ll find links for a number of our free offers. We have downloads to help root you in scripture, help you understand the issues surrounding Israel, and the importance of Christian support for Israel. Don’t forget, please follow us on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn and stay connected. Thank you and God bless.

Dr. Susan Michael: We hope you have enjoyed this episode of Out of Zion with Susan Michael. Be sure to subscribe to Out of Zion now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, pray.com, Salem OnePlace, Salem Life Audio. Out of Zion with Susan Michael is a production of ICEJ USA. All rights reserved.